


Moving in a Still Frame

by ShastaFirecracker



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 05:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3108164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShastaFirecracker/pseuds/ShastaFirecracker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"How long have you known?"</p>
<p>"Ages," Hermione whispered. "Since I did Professor Snape's essay..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moving in a Still Frame

_"Moving in a still frame. Howling at the moon."_  
Low, R.E.M.

\---

Hermione closed her eyes and settled her head gently against the carved headboard of her bed. The wood felt as soft as a pillow. She longed for sleep, but there was still an hour until midnight; think of all the work you can get done, she told herself. The more done now, the more free time you can have later. But free time was an illusion and she knew it. If she ever managed to eke out so much as ten extra minutes, she'd only spend it dozing.

She could pull out the little hourglass around her neck, she thought – not the first time the idea had idly crossed her mind. Flip it back once, sleep for an hour – one innocent hour; no one would notice – and wake up at this precise moment, rested and bright again, good for another three hours' essay-writing...

But she'd promised Professor McGonagall. The rules were strict, and she'd _promised_ she would only use the Time Turner to get to her classes. She'd never been authorized to create extra time to sleep or do homework. She'd sworn to Professor McGonagall that she could handle the added load – a regular class schedule lacked challenge for her, left her with too much time on her hands. What if they took her Turner away and she had to drop half her classes? Besides, turning time back right now would mean appearing here, in the bed, next to herself. And she'd lived through the last hour without seeing herself, so she knew she wouldn't do it. She'd been very careful about that – she sometimes saw herself dashing down corridors to other classes, but she avoided these past-and-future Hermiones as best she could, and she had never spoken to one.

Her head began to throb gently. She bumped it against the headboard and opened her leaden eyes. It was ten after eleven.

She shook her head, then her writing wrist. She re-settled A History of Magic across her knees – she was using it as a lap desk – and spread a fresh roll of parchment open across it. In small, neat script she wrote her name, the class, the date, and the title of the paper: Methods of Identifying and Destroying Werewolves.

She wouldn't be surprised if she was the only one in the class even bothering to do this essay. Everyone else would be banking on Professor Lupin cancelling it, but Hermione was worried that Lupin might be more ill than anyone was letting on and that Snape might be substituting their next class as well. If Snape was there again and she _hadn't_ done the essay... well, she didn't like to think.

Hermione dipped her quill in the ink bottle on her bedside table and began an introductory paragraph from memory; she clearly recalled reading about the identifying marks of the werewolf versus the mundane wolf. After several inches of neat, steady scribbling, though, she had reached the end of her common knowledge and had to let the parchment spring back into a roll so she could bend down and pick up her Defense book. She turned to page 394 and began to read.

She read. The silence of the dormitory was not a complete one: the windowpane creaked, withstanding the wind, and crackled minutely with cold. Her curtains shifted in a tiny draft, a heavy, slow rasp of velvet on velvet. The other girls breathed. Parvati let out a tiny whistle with every sleeping sigh.  
Hermione read by wandlight, and her heart beat slow, steady, loud in her ears.

By midnight she was wide awake.

She stopped reading reluctantly, and closed the book with a jerky hand. It had not taken her fifty minutes to read the chapter; it had only taken her ten. But she had gone back, as soon as she'd finished, and read this sentence again. Then that. Then, a section. Then the whole chapter, and then the index notation for “werewolf” (pp 2-4, p 57, p82, pp 113-127, pp 394-413), and then every other reference in the book, and then half of those over again as well.

She held her hand flat against the cover of the Defense book to stop it trembling. She told herself it was trembling because she was exhausted, and because it had been a very long time since dinner (two more hours than it had been for everyone else). She was tired, and hungry, and not thinking clearly. She blamed her thoughts on two and a half years of being friends with Harry and Ron, succumbing to paranoia, their mundane lives overshadowed by dangerous situations outside their control, solving their problems through investigative meddling.

She... she knew what she'd read, and she knew what it meant, but she also knew it _couldn't_ be true, or rather, it couldn't be both true and a secret; she knew she couldn't be the only one who had... put two and two together.

She thought of Professor Snape; _turn to page 394._ The vicious little smile he'd worn when he'd said Professor Lupin was too ill to teach. She thought of the way he talked to Professor Lupin, the veil that hid his disdain far thinner than it was with any other professor.

She thought of the day they had come to Hogwarts on the train, and of the moon chart she had just finished earlier this evening for Astronomy. (Did Professor Snape know they were doing lunar charts in Astronomy?) The first of September, waning gibbous. The moon had had the thinnest of slivers carved off one side, two days past full. Professor Lupin had slept deeply, looking ill and wan and worn and as tired as she felt now.

Her heart was beating a little faster and the tips of her fingers felt warm. Her head ached in a gentle, rhythmic throb; when she blinked, it was with extra effort and a little grittiness. When she leaned her head back against the headboard, the press of the wood against her oversensitive scalp was suddenly unbearable. She had lost track of how long she'd been awake.

Professor Lupin was a werewolf.

She would observe him, she told herself. She would keep a note, a tiny set of notes, hidden away. She would prove it to herself without a doubt before she did anything with this knowledge. But...

Professor Snape had to know, and if Snape knew, there was no way in the world Dumbledore didn't know. Dumbledore must know. And if he had hired Lupin, had trusted him – trusted him around children –

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut and raised her hands to press her palms into her eyes until she saw crimson flashes and black spots. She rubbed the grit from her tear ducts with her thumbs. She was being ridiculous. Ridiculous! Professor Lupin was a fantastic teacher. They had never had a decent Defense Against the Dark Arts class until this year and they desperately needed that subject above all others. She had absorbed a lot of wizarding culture but the very depth of her soul still belonged in her Muggle home, and she simply did not have the viscerally negative reaction to this information that, say, Ron would probably have.

In an instant, she realized that she couldn't tell Ron. And if she couldn't tell Ron she couldn't tell Harry.

She took a breath. Well, she was already keeping a secret from them this year. It hadn't been the easiest thing but it had been the right thing; she didn't doubt that. This would be an easy thing to keep to herself. As for right -

She thought again of Professor Lupin, kind-spoken, entertainingly informative, good with Neville, who treated students like mental equals and trusted them to hold their own. She thought of the shabby robes he wore and the dodgy suitcase held together with so much knotted string it was like a macrame cozy. She thought of the times he sat at the staff table and picked listlessly at his food, looking vaguely green (waxing gibbous?), and the times he ate as much as Harry, Ron and the twins put together, polite enough in his manners that no one seemed to notice how starving he was. She thought of the smoking potion Harry had witnessed him drink, brought to him by Snape. She thought of the way he didn't talk much, even to his fellow teachers up at the staff table, and of the times she had seen him in the library touching the spines of the books as if they were old friends he hadn't seen in a long, long time.

Yes, as secrets went, she knew it would be both easy and right to keep it. She had no right nor any desire to drag Lupin's identity into the meat grinder that was the student rumor mill. She sighed. The tremble had left her hands and her headache had faded slightly. The adrenaline rush of her realization was fading, and with it all of her panic and thoughtlessness.

She hadn't gotten any more work done, but she had three more days to finish her essay for Snape, and according to her lunar chart, Professor Lupin would certainly be back to his classroom by next week anyway. But she wanted to write the essay now, even if she didn't have to turn it in, simply for her own sense of completeness. She wondered if she could find a way to hand it in to Lupin directly. She wondered if he would read it, and understand that she knew. She wondered if she wanted him to know that she knew; a part of her recoiled at the thought. No, really... best to leave it be.

She sat up, stretched her arms over her head, crackled the bones of her writing wrist and rubbed it with her other hand. Her books and parchment went onto the floor beside her bed; she was too tired to place them properly back in her trunk or bag. Quill and ink bottle (tightly sealed) on her bedside table. She shifted to lay down and it occurred to her that she had never felt anything softer than her mattress before in her life. The whole center of gravity of the world seemed to swirl, change, and settle into a new configuration around her when she put her head down on the pillow.

“Nox,” she whispered to her wand, and darkness swept in to fill the hollow spaces of her exhaustion.


End file.
